English literature is full of likely encounters one would love to know more about. Marlowe bumping into Shakespeare, perhaps, or Oscar Wilde at dinner with Henry James.

In the department of lost meetings, one near-miss that's always fascinated me is the on-off friendship between F Scott Fitzgerald and PG Wodehouse, both of whom came to prominence in America at the end of the Great War.

Wodehouse shared a literary agent (Paul Reynolds) with Fitzgerald, a connection that strengthened when Wodehouse moved to Great Neck on Long Island in 1923. At that point the author of post-war bestseller The Inimitable Jeeves was riding high on Broadway. Indeed, if he had been run over by a bus in the 1920s (he was, in fact, knocked down by a car but remained miraculously unscathed), he would have been noted as much for his musical lyrics as for Bertie Wooster, or indeed for Lord Emsworth and the Empress of Blandings.

Fitzgerald was out there in Great Neck, too, riding high on the success of This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and beginning to work on his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, a novel set in Manhattan and Long Island.

We know the two men met, but that's about it. Wodehouse writes to his daughter Leonora about seeing "Scott" on the train to the city: "I believe those stories you hear about his drinking are exaggerated," he wrote. "He [FSF] seems quite normal, and is a very nice chap indeed. You would like him. The only thing is, he does go into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives there, but it doesn't show him at his best in Great Neck. I would like to see more of him."

And there, tantalisingly, the scene fades. If they did "see more" of each other, Wodehouse does not mention it. All we know is that, towards the end of his life, Wodehouse occasionally wrote about Fitzgerald's work, in rather disparaging terms, I regret to say. Certainly, he never vouchsafed any biographical snippet to interest posterity. Too bad.

Blandings (derived from Blandings Castle, the Tudor country house set in Market Blandings, Shropshire) is the quintessence of old England. It's one of those hallowed settings in English literature whose characters – Lord Emsworth, Sir Galahad ("Uncle Fred") Threepwood, Lady Constance, the super-efficient secretary Rupert Baxter, Beach the butler, and Angus McAllister, the grumpy Scots gardener – have become part of the national conversation in a series of blissful comic plots revolving around the life and adventures of "Empress of Blandings", a Berkshire sow.

I note, en passant, that Wodehouse, an essentially Edwardian writer, must have been familiar with the Beatrix Potter story for children, "The Tale of Pigling Bland". As an inveterate lifter of good stuff from contemporary prose, I wonder if this was more than unconscious borrowing?

We'll never know, of course, but Blandings came to represent a certain kind of English pastoral myth in the 1920s and 30s as much as Gatsby can be said to capture the spirit of the American Jazz age. Both Wodehouse and Fitzgerald, in their prime, achieved a fictional prose that was close to a kind of poetry. Both relied on the mass audience of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post to sustain inter-war careers of incredible popular success, and both achieved something very rare in the Anglo-American literary tradition: fiction that appeals to every kind of audience, high and low. That's why actors queue up to play Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford; Leonardo di Caprio) and Clarence, 9th earl of Emsworth (Ralph Richardson; Peter O'Toole and now, Timothy Spall).

But roles this good rarely make the transition from the page to the screen. From the brief trailers I've seen so far, I fear we may be in for a disappointment if we expect too much from these two screen adaptations. At the very least, they will send readers back to the subtle magic of Wodehouse and Fitzgerald, 20th-century giants.